


when we were gone astray

by hitlikehammers



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Dysfunctional Family, Family Dynamics, Gen, Holidays, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Sibling Rivalry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-03
Updated: 2015-01-03
Packaged: 2018-03-05 01:42:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,681
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3100361
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five holiday gifts Mycroft gave to his brother, and one time a gift was received, in kind.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when we were gone astray

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> For the Winter Holmestice 2014 Exchange; [hopeisathreat](http://hopeisathreat.livejournal.com), I hope that this touches on enough of the things you mentioned in your requests to be to your liking—I wanted to give you Mycroft and Sherlock with Sherlock/John, backstory/character study, and just enough angst without being too harrowing ;) A very happy holidays to you!

**_i. pear_ **

 

In truth, Mycroft is actually quite proficient.

Those are precisely the words his piano teacher uses, in point of fact: _quite proficient_.

It’s said in a calm way, with a quirk of the lip: simple, banal, like the scales he’d been forced to repeat again, and again and again and Mycroft despises it, knuckles straining as he stares down the line of ivory before him until the sharps and flats force the white to bleed toward grey.

Mycroft despises it, because while he maintains composure, hands folded behind his back, spine straight and face placid despite the urge to scream, his brother—his insufferable baby _brother_ is babbling away about Miss Finnette’s prematurely grey hair and the suffocating odour of rotting fruit that follows her around as dependably as the battalion of felines to which she gives succour, and even so: even _so_ , through the flush of her cheeks and the grimace etched into her features ( _also aged before their time, don’t you see it Myc, all the wrinkles, a faithless lover, do you think?_), Miss Finnette’s forcing out between her teeth words that make Mycroft’s skin crawl.

_Preternaturally advanced...I don’t want to use the term ‘prodigy’ precisely, yet…_

Mycroft damn near _seethes_ for it; Sherlock simply sits, and rolls his eyes in irritation as the cats try to lick at his ankles.

Mycroft tells himself on the walk home that he’s much more skilled at a great number of things than his younger sibling—even accounting for the age difference. His facility with languages far surpassed Sherlock’s own at six—Sherlock’s still not conjugating correctly, not to mention grammatical genders. Mycroft excels at Chess, of course: Mycroft had bested their mother before starting primary school, where Sherlock sometimes still loses to Daddy. 

And Deductions: Sherlock may find the game far more fascinating, but Mycroft has always been the more observant as a matter of course. Where Sherlock works to see, to situate the clues in their rightful places, it comes to Mycroft naturally: the world organises itself in his eyes to make sense without shaking, without effort. It always has. What Sherlock squints to focus upon, Mycroft sees behind his eyes before he blinks

Mycroft tries to find comfort in these facts. Mycroft tries not to dwell on the pettiness, the sour twinge in his thirteen-year-old chest when Sherlock slides another stack of papers across the table between them—not shy, precisely, but expectant: another composition. Notes on staves. 

Mycroft doesn’t have to stare at them long to know that they’re beautiful, that the piece would settle like glass and sunlight to hear it, to know it, to breathe it in. Mycroft knows this.

Mycroft hums noncommittally and turns back to the crumpled pages of _The Telegraph_ with the rings from Daddy’s coffee stained through the headlines. Mycroft doesn’t dwell, doesn’t think upon the expression that rests on Sherlock’s face beyond his view, outside his vision: he doesn’t ponder what he’d see if he looked back. If he was different from what, from _who_ he is.

Much like he doesn’t dwell on the fact that it was a lie he’d told his mother: _He stares at it every time we walk past, and he doesn’t even like playing the piano. Please, Mummy, please can we get him the violin for Christmas?_

Mycroft does not dwell.

But if Sherlock was a gifted pianist, it is entirely possible that he was born, specifically, for the violin. Mycroft doubts this, but. The possibility, however _im_ probable, remains. In any case: he never returns to Miss Finnette’s. Mycroft himself only lasts another year himself, walking home alone from lessons, covered in cat hair and the stale stench of pears gone off.

Sherlock never slides staves across the kitchen table again.

And Mycroft suffers his brother’s jibes regarding his diet for years after, the not-so-subtle barbs about substituting that last piece of cake for a salad, maybe, or a bit of fresh fruit.

It’s fitting, probably; it’s well-deserved that the slight nausea Mycroft suffers in the face of produce—specifically pears, rotten or no—takes him back, settles heavy in his gut, leaves him lightheaded.

Remorse, he learns, tastes of ruined harvests; keens like a tabby over soured milk.

 

**_ii. dove_ **

 

Precision. It’s something that Mycroft prides himself on, something he prioritises. Precision of action. Of intent. Of expression. Of language. He prides himself on articulating with the utmost clarity, with absolute certitude. He knows exactly what must be said, and when, and how. He is valued for this capacity. 

And yet: here, and now, with this—there is no precision. There is no clarity.

There is a body, on starched-white linens; there is skin that gleams like wax, that bruises like the flesh of remorse: there is a chest that barely rises. There is a scattering of leeds, darker than the figure they stick to; there are lines of red, low marks drawn down pale arms, failure, failure, _failure_ : impossible, and yet.

He swallows: terror, but not.

_Imprecise._

Time passes, but god knows how long. Breaths mingle, but far too few. There’s a low resonance, a glow on a screen that counts the heartbeats that hadn’t sounded, that had abandoned the world for moments, for too many moments, and there is a raucous, hateful clamouring that doesn’t beep, doesn’t glow, but Mycroft feels how it shakes in his bones as he watches his brother’s form on the bed, and Mycroft can’t prove it, can’t defend the claim, but he thinks that the force of it, the way it shakes horror and feeling and wetness from the corners of his eyes—Mycroft thinks the way his own heart pounds could have been enough for the two of them, could have charted duets across coffee-stained papers if he’d been given a chance, if he’d taken the opportunity, if he’d looked. _Seen_.

Bile rises in his throat; the cadence of his breath changes before Sherlock’s does—the rise of his shoulders unsteady before stilling, before Sherlock so much as flinches for the world that persists around him, the world he left, was dragged back to for the breaking that comes with the loss.

The sun starts to rise, to cast Sherlock’s fragile body in a sickly sort of light. The sun rises, and Mycroft thinks it might be Christmas, thinks it might be New Year’s. Thinks it might be hellfire from the night.

His throat is sore, his chest is tight; _caring_. 

It’s not a thing that Mycroft prides himself on.

Sherlock’s eyelids dare to flutter, hint toward it, perhaps. Maybe. Wishful thinking. Miracles in the dark.

Mycroft tells himself it’s a kindness, to his brother, that he leaves before Sherlock wakes. A gift, of sorts—the last vestiges of pride preserved. A peace offering. The warmth of absence, cast out from the cold.

But in the interest of precision: he doesn’t tell the same lie to himself.

 

_**iii. french** _

 

It’s a foolish indulgence. Absolutely foolish. Unforgivable, perhaps: a breach in protocol, in the cover maintained that has no place, no justification. A risk taken for next to nothing. 

Mycroft sighs. His brother’s always been a bit of an imbecile; just never quite like this.

Given: the thing’s not _asked_ , not outright—except that it is. The thing’s not owned to, except that it was never in doubt. It’s a thought rather than a sneer where that happy announcement was never made, not with words, but implied in the way that bodies move and eyes flicker; it’s a heart where a head should be, and Mycroft scorns the rule of it, of _course_ he scorns it—but.

In the privacy of his own space, his own mind: Mycroft can admit what Sherlock is. What he means. The hold he maintains. What his loss would do.

Mycroft can admit, just not in words.

He fears, even as he gives, what the truth will do to his brother.

Mycroft fears the loss that might ensue, and what that loss will mean for _him_.

Mycroft knows where Sherlock is; Mycroft knows the game they play.

He readies the prints as if they’re the rare proofs they’re passed off to be, sending the actual stills between the professional matting of gorgeously-set pieces a Mr. Sigerson won through an auction on eBay. All quite boring. All quite routine.

It takes an obscene amount of time to post them; typical, apparently, of the holidays—Mycroft wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have gone himself to see this done had it been anything else; anyone else. They cost an obscene amount to overnight to Marseille.

Yet Mycroft fears they’ll cost far more once Sherlock sees the images captured from the CCTV feeds; once he deduces what it means: two people. Two figures. 

Mycroft hopes that, for everything Sherlock sees, that he still misses what matters, still flounders where it counts at Deductions.

Mycroft hopes that Sherlock doesn’t notice that the woman next to John Watson is the same in both shots; that Mary Elizabeth Morstan leans in softly—far too close.

Mycroft hopes, but it was never a precise sort of thing, never very wise.

To hope.

 

**_iv. calling_**

 

He doesn’t suspect them to be in, when he arrives. Sherlock should be off to meet their parents for the theatre. John should be out with the Stamford fellow for holiday drinks.

Mycroft should probably have learned by now, rather definitively: where his brother is concerned, the word _should_ means absolutely nothing.

They’re not in the sitting room this time, thankfully—nor the kitchen, which is even more of a boon: that image had single-handedly curbed Mycroft’s appetite for the better part of a week. Mycroft can hear them, though, from Sherlock’s bedroom, behind closed doors, and the objectivist in him notes the shift, the change in substance: where Mycroft has walked in on the escapades of his brother wrapped wholly in John Watson, caught within the throes of something vital more times than the elder Holmes would like, the tonal characters of each glimpsed encounter have largely presented as variations on a theme. Wrathful vengeance, upon returning. Conflicted betrayal, upon the revelation of a lie. Selfish need, when the plane had turned. Devastated proof-of-life, when betrayal had led to loss—mother and child, a single act, a duplicate tragedy. Frantic lust, in the spaces between.

The objectivist, in Mycroft’s mind—the larger part of his whole, to be fair: the objectivist had noted the concordance, had seen the parallels between reality and the way these men had met, had clashed.

The subjectivist, at a grave disadvantage: the subjectivist in Mycroft’s chest had worried, because it could not find in John the same depths that moved when Sherlock reached, when Sherlock held, when Sherlock yearned for more than a body, more than the flesh.

Here, though: here, and now, with the chill of the day at his back and the warmth of something less tangible than metaphysical splayed vast before him in this place he is not welcome, in this space he is not known—here, Mycroft listens to the discordant volumes, finds a softness he’s never heard in this meeting before: whispers. Gasping that rings faint, rings choked, rings true. 

Murmurs, declarations half-heard because they’re not meant for him. 

There’s a strange twist at Mycroft’s sternum, as he toys with the binder in his hands: long-overdue confirmation, he knows well, of what Sherlock’s more than sussed out—of what he’s certain, in this moment, that Sherlock’s never said to John.

Mycroft does not complete the task he came for: he does not leave the results—a paternity test for the child, lost inside her mother’s womb. It is not a thing that needs knowing.

Not precisely.

The moan that rings out through the walls is likewise not a thing that needs knowing, and Mycroft cringes, descends the stairs, and phones Mummy to apologise for Sherlock’s tardiness; assures her a car will be arriving shortly, and he’ll meet them at the Adelphi post-haste. 

He sighs deeply. If this is the gift he gives to his brother this season, Mycroft thinks, than he suspects that Sherlock rather owes him something very nice, in exchange.

 

_**v. ring** _

 

It breaks with tradition, to disregard the bequest. Of course, Mycroft appreciates the precision of the instructions: the eldest son’s eldest son. He hadn’t been at the reading of the will, too young at the time, but when he’d come of age, the ring had come with.

It’s a hideous thing, really, aesthetically speaking: too broad, too ornate, in desperate need of cleaning. Mycroft can’t process the desire to wear it as his grandfather had: right hand, tawdry and stately and all the things that died with him, really, because even in Mycroft’s line of work, he isn’t that; he’s never been _that_.

Still, though. Symbols have their place, and this one’s traveled down centuries, if the stories are to be believed. Every eldest son’s eldest son’s eldest son.

And—less for sentiment and more for practicality—it seems disrespectful to force the line to break simply because Mycroft will never carry it forth. Should Sherlock likewise (and most probably) decline the charge, well: at least it would be well-used to its last. At least it could speak one more volume to the world—one _new_ volume to the heart—before it finds its home in the ground.

And Mycroft’s always had the eye for the unspoken, true: but this thing between his brother and John Hamish Watson doesn’t require eyes to be seen, doesn’t require sight to be known—it’s tangible, thick between them and spreading, splaying out: suffocating.

Giving _life_.

So to place the ornamented circlet of metal into an envelope is of no consequence. To slip the envelope in with the post is not a trial. To write the note that accompanies the gift, tied in festive green and red because Mycroft does attempt to get his entertainment where he can—to write the note that’s tucked inside is simple:

_My best advice is that he seems to have taken a liking to you. Thus: be your insufferable self, mon frère, and that should be sufficient to secure the fabled ‘yes’._

He considers a single cigarette—full tar, this time—but thinks twice of it. It’s not necessary.

He seals the package, and it does not shake the world. 

To receive the text that night, long into the dark hours, though; between the give of his a chair, with one hand clamped around classified documents and the other balancing a brandy in need of a topping off: to receive the text, however—like the drink, it is something far more layered, much more complex.

_An announcement. One might call it ‘happy’._

The corners of Mycroft’s lips quirk as he tips back his glass and thinks, yes. They might. It’s not precisely accurate, though. 

It doesn’t _quite_ encompass the _whole_.

 

_**~ solfège** _

 

It’s buried beneath official reports, transcripts of meetings that never technically occurred, release forms and lines awaiting signatures.

He’s not sure how it got there. He’s not sure he needs to know.

The black on white doesn’t register, at first; blurs behind his eyelids after so many rows of text, to see the straight lines, to see the clefs, the notes.

The symphony takes wing inside his mind; there’s a clenching in his chest as he reads the hastily scrawled title, only makes out half the words through the bleed of ink, but enough: _Les chats_ ; _Finnette_.

And Mycroft doesn’t have to look, doesn’t have to read the music itself to know the way that it will ring. He doesn’t have to.

But he sets aside the work that waits—forever waiting, ever-present—and reaches for the bottle of Oban in his desk, except it’s not Oban he extracts, not scotch that greets him with a red bow tied clumsily around the neck. 

_La Poire_. Of course.

And Mycroft’s not much of a vodka drinker. 

But he thinks that perhaps he was wrong, about his brother, and Deductions.

Perhaps Sherlock always saw more than he let on.

**Author's Note:**

> On [tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com), if you're game.


End file.
